Transatlantic Howl! A Dedication to Allen Ginsberg

14 October 2004

In this history-making transatlantic poetic happening, celebrating Allen Ginsberg and his epic poem HOWL, poets performed at venues in London, Paris, and across the United States. These live poetry readings and poetic theatre pieces were simultaneously streamed across JANET, Renater, and Internet2 advanced networks. Streaming video and audio allowed audiences at each site to not only observe readings on location, but to experience the art of poetry in remote theaters as well. While Transatlantic Howl! A Dedication to Allen Ginsberg was streamed, anyone from Calcutta to Caracas with broadband access was able to watch the entire poetry reading as it happened.

Featured readers included Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman, Anne Carson, Robert Glück, Ken Mikolowski, Danny Karlin, Joanne Kyger, Bob Rosenthal, Steven Taylor, Ed Sanders, Jacqueline Cahen-Sergent, Alice Notley, The Allen Ginsberg Greek Chorus, composer and musician Bill Douglas, Stephen Mooney, students from London, and surprise special guests. Anne Waldman of Naropa University and Internet2's Ann Doyle served as MCs for this event.

Universities who assisted in producing this poetry reading were: University College London; Birkbeck College, University of London; Renater at ENSAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers); San Francisco State University; University of Colorado, Boulder; University of Michigan; and New Jersey Institute of Technology. Technical support was provided by Ohio State University with additional assistance by Naropa University's Summer Writing Program.

If you have any questions about Transatlantic Howl! A Dedication to Allen Ginsberg, contact Ann Doyle <adoyle@internet2.edu>, phone (734) 352-7011 or Mary Kite <mckite@indra.com>, phone (303) 444-9856.

Program
Netcast Archive
Participants
Acknowledgements

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Program

The program for Transatlantic Howl! A Dedication to Allen Ginsberg will take place at the following time. Some locations are providing venues where audiences can view the event.

Paris, 20:00
London, 19:00 in the University College of London's Pearson Building
New York, 14:00
Ann Arbor, 14:00 in the Video/Peformance Studio at the Duderstadt Center
Boulder, noon
San Francisco, 11:00

To calculate the time for watching this live event from your time zone, refer to the World Clock web page.

Program — Part I

Round robin transatlantic reading of Allen Ginsberg's HOWL from his book Howl and Other Poems. The poets will read in the following order from the following locations.

Joanne Kyger & Robert Gluck at San Francisco State University

Ken Mikolowski at University of Michigan

Anne Carson at University of Michigan

Anne Waldman at University of Michigan

Danny Karlin at University College London

Stephen Mooney at Birkbeck College & University College London

Alice Notley & Jacqueline Cahen-Sergent at Renater at ENSAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers)

Bob Rosenthal at New Jersey Institute of Technology

Ed Sanders at New Jersey Institute of Technology

Amiri Baraka at New Jersey Institute of Technology

Steven Taylor & The Allen Ginsberg Greek Chorus at University of Colorado, Boulder

Program — Part II

Poets interpret, read, sing, or do poetic group performances to Allen Ginsberg's work in the following order and from the following locations:

University of Colorado, Boulder
Steven Taylor — “On Anothers Sorrow” by William Blake, music by Allen Ginsberg

University of Michigan
Ken Mikolowski — “Punk Rock You're My Big Crybaby” by Allen Ginsberg

Anne Carson & Students — an essay

Anne Waldman — “Pentagon Exorcism” by Allen Ginsberg

San Francisco State University
Robert Gluck — “Message” by Allen Ginsberg

Joanne Kyger— poems from American Sentences

University College London
Birkbeck College, University of London
Danny Karlin & Students — he and a few of his students will produce and deliver a reading as a poetic response to HOWL based on the writings and language of those writers studied within the context of Professor Karlin's UCL course who have an affinity to the work of Allen Ginsberg (Whitman, Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and others).  

London Under Construction — will take responses (within an academic framework) to Allen Ginsberg's HOWL from students at UCL. London Under Construction will then use/contort/mash up this source material to produce a performance piece that reflects performative concerns as they relate to issues raised by the relationship of HOWL to the problematics of contemporary poetics—with sound, visual image and physical elements.

Renater at ENSAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers)
Alice Notley & Jacqueline Cahen-Sergent — “Footnote to HOWL” by Allen Ginsberg

New Jersey Institute of Technology
Bob Rosenthal — “Wichita Vortex Sutra” by Allen Ginsberg

Ed Sanders — "Starry Rhyme" by Allen Ginsberg

Amiri Baraka — is going to state his view on HOWL's cultural relevance today.

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Participants

AMIRI BARAKA
In 1934 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) was born in the industrial city of Newark, New Jersey. After attending Howard University in Washington, DC, he served in the United States Air Force. In the late fifties he settled in New York's Greenwich Village where he was a central figure of that bohemian scene. He became nationally prominent in 1964, with the New York production of his Obie Award-winning play, Dutchman. After the death of Malcolm X he became a Black Nationalist, moving first to Harlem and then back home to Newark. In the mid-1970s, abandoning Cultural Nationalism, he became a Third World Marxist-Leninist. In 1999, after teaching for twenty years in the Department of Africana Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook, he retired. However, in retirement he is as active and productive as an artist and intellectual as he has ever been in his career. Currently he lives with his wife, the poet Amina Baraka, in Newark.

JACQUELINE CAHEN-SERGENT
Parisian, Jacqueline Cahen-Sergent is a poet, writer and translator. For 25 years she has orginzed the international festival of poetry, POLYHONIX. Throughout France and Europe, Cahen-Sergent has presented her poetry as singular pieces of art as well as poetic collaborative performances with jazz musicians. She has also been published in numerous reviews and anthologies of poetry. Jacqueline Cahen-Sergent and Jean-Jacques Lebel have just retranslated HOWL, KADDISH and other poems, soon to be released by Gallimard Editions.

ANNE CARSON
Anne Carson was born in 1950. She received her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the University of Toronto. Her books of poetry include The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost (1999); Autobiography of Red (1998), shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize; Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1996); Glass, Irony and God (1995), shortlisted for the Forward Prize; and Goddesses And Wise Women (1992). Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), and the author of Eros the Bittersweet (1998). Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur "Genius" Award. Carson is was the Director of Graduate Studies in Classics at McGill University and now teaches Classics, Comparative Literature, and English at the University of Michigan.
www.poets.org

BILL DOUGLAS
Bill Douglas is a bassoonist-pianist-composer who has toured and recorded for thirty years with clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. As a bassoonist, he has played with the Toronto and New Haven Symphonies, And has recorded three RCA albums with Peter Serkin and Tashi. As a jazz pianist, he has toured and recorded with vibraphonist Gary Burton and bassist Eddie Gomez. In 1994, SOCAN, the Canadian equivalent of ASCAP and BMI, presented him with their classical composer of the year award. His compositions have been performed by major orchestras and chamber groups around the world. He has been teaching at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado for twenty-seven years. He has recorded twelve albums of his music on the Hearts of Space label, the latest of which is entitled Stepping Stones.

ROBERT GLÜCK
Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including the two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist. His new book, Denny Smith, was published by Clear Cut in February. He's an editor of Narrativity, a website on narrative theory.

DANNY KARLIN
Danny Karlin is currently Professor of English at University College London, where he has taught since 1980, specialising in nineteenth and twentieth century literature, especially Victorian poetry but including, also, a strong interest in American writing. He has written several books about Robert Browning and has edited Browning's poetry; he has also written on Rudyard Kipling, on Walt Whitman, and on Bob Dylan, and has just completed a book on Proust. Last summer he spoke at the Shakespeare and Co. Literary Festival in Paris on the connection between Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg and Dylan, which will feature in his next book, whose subject is figure of the singer in English poetry. From January 2005 he will take up a joint post in the University Professors Programme and the English Department at Boston University.

THE ALLEN GINSBERG GREEK CHORUS
conceived by Mary Kite
conducted by Bill Douglas
accompanied by Steven Taylor

Anselm Hollo, Jeffrey Robinson, Jack Collom, Lisa Tamiris Becker, Katherine Eggert, Eleni Sikelianos, Marilyn Krysl, Akilah Oliver, Elizabeth Robinson, Lisa Birman, Patrick Pritchett, Jenny Dorn, Claire Farago, Reed Bye, Randy Roark, John Sakkis, Andrew Wille, Michelle Auerbach, Todd McCarty, Sam Wall, Soma Feldmar, and others.

MARY KITE
Mary Kite's most recent literary collaborations are Fleuve Flâneur, Mary Kite, Anne Waldman (Erudite Fangs, 2004) and Spilled Beans: A Conversation, Kenward Elmslie & Mary Kite with Drawings by Joe Brainard (Skanky Possum Press). Her musings have also been featured in Napalm Health Spa, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Morkville, Poems From Penny Lane (farfalla press/McMillan & Parrish) and New York City's Museum of Modern Art. She has produced and directed events such as: Paul Bowles: A Retrospective; Tyger! Tyger! A William Blake Multimedia Festival; and Surrealist! A Jean Cocteau Multimedia Festival.

JOANNE KYGER
Joanne Kyger, a native California poet, often associated with the Beat writers and the San Francisco Renaissance, has taught at the Naropa Summer Writing Program, and the New College of San Francisco. She is the author of over 20 books of poetry, the recent being Some Life (Post Apollo Press, 2000), Strange Big Moon, The Japan-India Journals 1960-64 (North Atlantic Books, 2000), and Again; Poems 1989-2000 (La Alameda Press, 2001). Her most recent book is As Ever: Selected Poems (Penguin/Putnam, 2002).

LONDON UNDER CONSTRUCTION
London Under Construction (LUC) is a collective of poets living and working in London. They create within frames and environments that encourage spontaneous composition and textually generative performance; that partly documents itself and is lineated within autonomy. Their compositions constitute a play of surface with form, and of heterodox performative gestures. It is therefore, a development that won't settle into any final or definitive form and could be said to investigate the uncertainties and ambiguities of collaborative spatial and temporal practice. They have performed at SubVoicive, Partly Writing 3, Taxi Gallery, Eton Mission, the CPT, Diorama Arts Centre, the Klinker, etc. They are the editors of the ongoing Underground Poems and Reception projects.

The core membership that will be performing on 14 October 2004 includes: Piers Hugill, Doug Jones, Aodhan McCardle, Stephen Mooney, Chris Paul, and Stephen Pochin, as well as special guest Niall McDevitt.

KEN MIKOLOWSKI
Ken Mikolowski started The Alternative Press in 1969 with his late wife Ann Mikolowski. For over thirty years they hand-set and letterpress printed poetry and art broadsides, postcards, bookmarks, bumperstickers and other functional formats. He also teaches creative writing at The University of Michigan's Residential College and is the author of three books of poetry.

STEPHEN MOONEY
Stephen Mooney was born 1971 in Zambia, lived in Ireland until 1994, and in London since then. He is pursuing a PhD in contemporary poetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he is part of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre there. He is also a poet, and part of the performative poetry grouping ‘London Under Construction', and one of those behind ‘Veer Books'.

ALICE NOTLEY
Alice Notley is the author of The Descent of Alette, Mysteries of Small Houses, and Disobedience (all from Penguin USA) and the forthcoming volume of essays, Coming After (University of Michigan). She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Shelley Award, and the Griffin Prize. She lives and writes in Paris, France.

BOB ROSENTHAL
Bob Rosenthal, who studied poetry under Paul Carroll, Ted Berrigan, Joel Oppenhiemer, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley, is a poet and a writer who has co-written and produced five plays. His 1970's Cleaning Up New York was regarded as a cult classic. His latest collection of poetry is Viburnum (White Fields Press, Tennessee). He has taught workshops at The Poetry Project, Snug Harbor, and the Naropa Institute. He worked as Allen Ginsberg's secretary for 20 years until Allen's death and currently is a Trustee of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Bob is also an adjunct Professor of English at New York Technical College. He is currently writing his account on the business of Allen Ginsberg and has written three other books of poetry: Morning Poems (Yellow Press, Chicago, 1972), Rude Awakenings (Yellow Press, Chicago, 1976), and Eleven Psalms (1999). He is married and has two sons.

ED SANDERS
Ed Sanders' recent books include America, A History in Verse, Volume 1 (1900-1939), America, a History in Verse, Volume 2 (1940-1961), and America, A History in Verse, Volume 3 (1962-1970). Volume 3 was published in 2003 by David Godine. Also in print are 1968, a History in Verse; Chekhov; and The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg, all written in accordance with the principles of "Investigative Poetry." Another recent project, The Fugs Final CD (Part 1) has been released this year by Artemis Records.

STEVEN TAYLOR
Steven Taylor has composed music for the theater and concert stage. He has toured and recorded with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, and Ed Sanders, and is a member of the seminal poetry-rock group the Fugs. He is currently chair of the Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University.

ANNE WALDMAN
Anne Waldman is the author of over 30 books and pamphlets of poetry including Fast Speaking Woman, Kill or Cure, IOVIS, Books I and II, Marriage: A Sentence, Vow To Poetry: Essays, Interviews and Manifestoes, and In The Room Of Never Grieve. She is also the editor of numerous anthologies including The Beat Book; and co-editor of Disembodied Poetics: Annals of The Jack Kerouac School, The Angel Hair Anthology, and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action and has just completed a book called Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin Poets, 2004). Her CDs include Alchemical Elegy and Battery: Live At Naropa. She is an active member of the Naropa Archive Project. Anne is co-founder of The Kerouac School, and Chair and Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. http://www.naropa.edu/swp/

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Acknowledgements

Several Internet2 member campuses are providing videoconferencing and other services in support of this event: Ohio State University (providing their MCU); University of Colorado, Boulder; University of Michigan; San Francisco State University; and New Jersey Institute of Technology. Other universities participating in producing this poetry reading are: University College London; Birkbeck College, University of London; and ENSAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers).

In addition, we would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance in producing this event:

Artistic Director
Mary Kite

Co-Producers
Mary Kite
Dan Boord
Ann Doyle

New Jersey Institute of Technology
Bill Duelly
Christopher Funkhouser

Ohio State University
Gabe Moulton
Megan Troyer

San Francisco State University
The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives
Doug Smith
Steve Dickison

Renater at ENSAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts et Métiers)
Jacques Prevost
Alain Quere
Dany Vandromme

University College London
Patrick Robinson

United Kingdom
Danny Karlin
Stephen Mooney

University of Colorado, Boulder
Luis Valdovino
Dan Boord
Jeffrey Cox

University of Michigan
Tom Bray
Keith Taylor
Ian Twiss
Jacques Mersereau 

Internet2
Ann Doyle
Susan Topol

Additional Support Provided By
The Allen Ginsberg Trust; Jerry Aronson; CITU; Contemporary Poetics Research Centre; Christopher Funkhouser; London Under Construction, Naropa University's Summer Writing Program; Naropa Archive Project www.naropa.archive.org; St. Mark's Poetry Project; San Francisco State University's THE POETRY CENTER AND AMERICAN POETRY ARCHIVES; University of Colorado at Boulder's Center for British and Irish Studies; University of Colorado at Boulder's Center for Humanities and the Arts; Steven Taylor; and Andrew Wille.